Success Story : TraceIT

How Fathom worked with TraceIT to get to point they are at!

TraceIT(www.traceit.co) has been one of Fathom’s most amazing clients. What is now an extensively evolved enterprise product started off as a simple three-screen app proof of concept. Nonetheless, a concept that was backed by stellar vision on how the product was going to be, so much so that TraceIT was one of the winners at University of Texas at Dallas’ Big Idea competition that was judged by Mark Cuban.

As a company TraceIT has grown and evolved significantly since then. Development of the primary product offering and customer market research have been progressing in parallel, with one constantly feeding into the other. And in this journey, there have been some critical pivots and significant enhancements. TraceIT now is a well-developed enterprise product.

Fathom has been very fortunate to have gotten this opportunity to contribute towards the success of TraceIT. While there are lots and lots of milestone points that we could mention, at a very high level, here is how our engagement with TraceIT can be elaborated:

Our engagement with TraceIT began in Jan 2016 with us brainstorming and ideating on that simple proof of concept that we needed so as to get the MVP going. Things moved very fast after that. There was a tremendous amount of market research done by the TraceIT team and that led us to adding more backend components, restructuring the overall user interface and re-architecting the overall model that we had previously scoped out.

Integration with the transportation management software, TMW was huge addition to the platform. This really allowed TraceIT to help cover functionality areas that augmented TMW and established a robust feedback loop for tracking of orders that were managed from within TMW. The integration is both real time for certain operations and batch mode for other areas. So also, api calls for certain operations are stacked up in asynchronous queue to handle situations where there may be a loss of connectivity (having recognized that trucks might get into areas such as quarries where network connectivity might be a big problem). As we helped achieve this integration, we also realized that an integration such as this had to be built as a adaptor, so that TMW integration could be a standalone component of the system, and could be turned on or off depending on the needs of TraceIT’s clients.

Jeevan Betigeri works tirelessly behind the scenes with his team of developers making our vision become reality in the products we put in front of our customers. He and his company have been a model of what true alignment and partnership look like to help create value and meaning for everyone within our ecosystem.

As with TMW integration, implementation of FMCSA mandated Hours of Service rules(HOS) and Electronic Logging Device (ELD) integration(iOT) was another huge milestone for the TraceIT platform. This has meant that not only are we having to integrate with iOT ELD devices such as Xirgo and CellContol but are also needing the TraceIT app to act as an intelligent facilitator of the ELD data into system. This way TraceIT can be absolutely sure that data sanity exists across the board, right from recording driver actions thru to device logs, and be able to make sense of the unified data.

While all of the above was being done, it began to appear to us that it is vital to be able to cater to the needs of different kinds of transportation and not just be a single unified solution. The guts of the system had to be common but we had to recognize that different kinds of transportation businesses have differing needs and it made great sense to evolve the platform to be much larger where there are overlapping, highly scalable vertical solutions that have emerged from the core platform, in a way where it was not only possible for TraceIT to configure the platform to the needs of a new client but also to be able to easily ramp them up. Likewise, the underlying infrastructure also had to be equally robust and scalable. And this is exactly what we built. The system is now almost at a point where, when a new customer signs up and begins to use TraceIT, the platform scales along with the needs of the customer.

This is where we are at. And it gives us goosebumps to even wonder what the next steps could be in our interaction with TraceIT. At the core of TraceIT is the phenomenal synergy between the co-founders of TraceIT, Will White and Kiran Devaprasad. They are a prime example of what happens when synergy, professionalism and extreme focus come together. None of the success that TraceIT has had would have been possible had there not been for all this. We are so proud that the relationship between Fathom and TraceIT has gone beyond that of a client-vendor relationship and we, at Fathom continue to be excited about what the future holds for TraceIT.